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Eldorado - Canada's National Uranium Company (Paperback)
Loot Price: R1,735
Discovery Miles 17 350
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Eldorado - Canada's National Uranium Company (Paperback)
Series: Heritage
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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On 16 May 1930, Gilbert LaBine discovered pitchblende near the
shores of Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories. This is the
story of Eldorado and the mine whose discovery marked the beginning
of Canada's uranium industry. Robert Bothwell tells how Gilbert and
Charlie LaBine, veteran Canadian prospectors, promoted and
developed Eldorado Gold Mins Limited to produce radium. Thought to
be the miracle cure for cancer, the rare mineral had a market price
at the time of $75,000 per gram. Riches seemed a certainty and the
company established a radium refinery at Port Hope, Ontario, in
1933. But manipulation of the market, the physical challenge of
taking men and supplies into Port Radium, NWT, and the difficulties
in extracting radium from ore at Port Hope prevented them from
realizing that imagined wealth. Along the way, the LaBine brothers
had become entangled with international radium interests in
Belgium, and at a crucial moment the Belgian cut the price to
$25,000 per gram. The LaBine enterprise was on the verge of
bankruptcy. But the Port Radium mine's pitchblende also contained
uranium. In the wartime race to split the uranium atom, scientists
from North America and Europe discovered its immense engery
potential. The uranium that had been Eldorado's waste became its
survival. In 1942, the U.S. Army contracted to buy all the uranium
the company could mine and refine. The political and economic
significance of the U.S. contract attracted the attention of the
Canadian government in the person of C.D. Howe. Eldorado became a
crown corporation in 1942, the secret sale of the company to the
federal government making millionaires of the LaBine brothes. Only
after the war did Eldorado make a profit, when the Cold War
accelerated and a whole industry grew up in Canada around uranium
production. Uranium became Canada's largest and most profitable
mineral export. 'While the going was good, it was very good indeed,
' says the author, but in 1959 the Americans and later the British
decided not to renew their Canadian contracts. The bottom dropped
out of the uranium markets, just as it had dropped out of the
radium market 20 years earlier. Eldorado negotiated with Canada's
allies to stretchout deliveries under the expiring contracts,
mainting the Canadian industry until markets for the peaceful use
of uranium in the generation of electricity could be developed.
However, the cost of waiting was high: in the early 1960s, mines
were closed and miners were out of work. Robert Bothwell, one of
Canada's foremost historians, has told the Eldorado story with
colour and drama. He has captured the excitement of frontier
resource development in the 1930s and the intrigue of international
politics in the 1940s and 1950s. Eldorado covers the company's
history until 1960, when the crown corporation turned to the
generation of electricity as the market for its products and
services.
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